28/12/2000

A different Christmas

Dec. 27th, 2000. In the heart of the Roman Trastevere quarter, the "classic" Christmas banquet has been held for the needy, organized by the Sant'Egidio community: an example of social welfare to be spread

It may be defined as a Christmas that is far-removed from consumerism, or from clich�s, but every definition in this sense might in any case seem like an exercise of consumed rhetoric. And so the only definition that best describes the Christmas banquet also organized this year by the Sant' Egidio community is that of "diversity".

Just like in the last nineteen Christmases, December 25th this year witnessed the transformation of the Santa Maria in Trastevere basilica into a great cafeteria, that gathered more than five-hundred people for Christmas lunch. Homeless, immigrants, nomads, the elderly, handicapped and drug-addicts, all gathered together at the same tables along with volunteers from the community, to celebrate Christmas independently from their belonging to different races and creeds.

Little big events
Many different stories have been hosted under the basilica's Baroque architecture. For example the group stories belonging to the nomads of the capital, who are in the news limelight exclusively thanks to tragic events, or those regarding the homeless, the invisible presences on our streets, who are only noticed when their lives are endangered by the cold. And then there are other, many individual stories. The one regarding Tiberio Mitri (in the photo at the bottom) for example, who was the Italian boxing middleweight champion during the 1950s, the great star of the television programme called Il Musichiere (he was the first one to be given the fantastic figure, for that period, of one-million lire), and the husband of Fulvia Franco, the 1952 Miss Italia. Mitri has been helped by the community's volunteers to stay in his own home (avoiding the hospice), regardless of life's hardships that have rained down on him after his fame in the fifties.

African Mission
The Christmas lunch, for the Sant'Egidio community, is nothing more than an appendix to the help and social welfare operations for the needy that 30,000 Italian volunteers, belonging to all social classes, carry out on a full-time basis, 365 days a year. The community is present in many realities, often even on the war-front.

They go from assistance to the poor in Italy, to diplomatic intermediation in civil wars, on to their recent venture, that has been made concrete with the presentation of over three-million signatures in a petition to the Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, requesting the suspension of death sentences in order to avoid judicial errors. Africa, a continent that is by now going adrift, is the objective on which the attention of Sant'Egidio is focalizing, on an international level. The community, fortified by its success in Mozambique where its participation has been very important in resolving the civil war, now tries to utilize its "diplomatic know-how" in Burundi, where it is guiding the negotiations for cease-fire and safety, while an attempt at pacification between the six national armies that have been tormenting Congo for years is forecast. And always from Mozambique comes the other great battle by the Trastevere volunteers, and that is the one against AIDS, the disease that is untreatable and above all unpredictable in the African continent considering the soaring costs, compared to the local salaries, of preventive measures.

A Christmas without boundaries
The Christmas lunch in the capital's most popular basilica is not the only example of Sant Egidio's "Christmas" activities, and in fact similar ventures have been carried out contemporarily in another four points in Rome, for a total of 5,000 meals. It has also been the first time for Genoa where, similarly to the Eternal City, the banquet has taken place inside a church. And even in the Mozambique capital, Maputo, in the heart of Africa upset by civil wars, Christmas has been celebrated by the community's volunteers along with prisoners: something like saying that solidarity does not possess boundaries of any nature and that race, creed or ideology must not represent obstacles in front of the possibility of improving the living conditions of 75% of the world's population, those people who do not possess our levels of wealth.

Sergio Ferraris